How IBM Is Using AI At Scale To Benefit The Media Industry

By Amit Chowdhry ● Oct 6, 2020
  • IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently announced 3 new products to add to its growing suite of artificial intelligence solutions for brands and publishers. These are the details.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently announced 3 new products to add to its growing suite of artificial intelligence solutions for brands and publishers. The new capabilities are privacy-forward and designed to enable brands to reach consumers while considering user privacy. And IBM intends to work with industry leaders, including Xandr/AT&T, Magnite, Nielsen, MediaMath, LiveRamp, and Beeswax to help scale the use of artificial intelligence across the industry.

The IBM Watson Advertising suite of solutions utilizes artificial intelligence to help clients make informed data-based decisions. And expanding on recent additions to the suite, including Watson Advertising Accelerator, Watson Advertising Social Targeting with Influential and Watson Advertising Weather Targeting among others, the planned AI-enabled capabilities also include:
1.) Extensions for IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator: Enhanced video and OTT capabilities available in the next few months that are expected to leverage Watson Machine Learning to help enable marketers to pivot video advertising creative based on individual user reaction.
2.) IBM Watson Advertising Attribution: The Beta Solution available in the coming months that utilizes Watson Machine Learning — which allows marketers to accurately quantify the efficacy of their advertising spend while understanding intent and performance drivers.
3.) IBM Watson Advertising Predictive Audiences: Solution utilizes Watson Discovery, to help enable marketers to progress beyond ‘look-alike’ to ‘do-alike’ segments in a privacy-forward format to reach consumers that exhibit similar behaviors.

IBM Watson is able to offer increased AI capabilities for businesses across language, automation, and trust. And the planned capabilities from IBM Watson Advertising will be designed to help infuse trust and transparency into the advertising ecosystem. IBM is also negotiating definitive agreements with Xandr/AT&T and Magnite.

KEY QUOTES:

“While the advertising industry strives to re-emerge strong from the global economic and societal issues we faced this year, it’s also deep in the throes of a major transformation with changes to mobile identity, certain elimination of third-party cookies, compliance and regulatory shifts and increased demand for trust and transparency.”

“We believe AI will be the ‘backbone’ of the new era as the industry prepares for the next generation of advertising. We’re using AI to help solve problems across the advertising industry, just like IBM has in countless other industries like Healthcare, Financial Services and Retail. Our work will be a step forward in our evolution to meet the advertising industry’s upheaval, and we are proud to help the advertising industry advance with the value of AI.”

— Bob Lord, SVP, Cognitive Applications and Blockchain, IBM

“We’re currently leveraging IBM’s AI through The Weather Channel, an approach that helps us use data to create meaningful and respectful experiences with consumers in the moments they need us most. IBM has evolved from an advertising partner to an AI partner, enabling us to help our customers and prospective customers better prepare and respond during life events.”
— Rand Harbert, Executive Vice President and Chief Agency, Sales & Marketing Officer, State Farm

“The advertising industry is undergoing rapid change and we’re infusing AI into our platform to better equip independent publishers in a sea of walled gardens. We’re proud to stand with IBM, a company rooted in advanced technology, to deliver on the promise of an open web and solve the mounting challenges facing independent publishers.”
— Tom Kershaw, CTO, Magnite

“Across WPP, we are committed to helping our clients navigate the disruptive trends that have been building for some time. We’ve seen firsthand the important role AI can play in mitigating bias and making data useful so that every constituent – brands, content owners and most importantly consumers – can have authentic, relevant and meaningful interactions.”
— John Dunleavy, Global President, Eightbar

“The opportunities for AI are immense–and we’re already seeing real value within the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. AI algorithms have vast potential to reinvigorate the brand-consumer trust dynamic by leveraging mathematical techniques that remove biases in the data consumers provide before they lead to improper results and interpretations. And within an open, cloud-based ecosystem, having the right, robust, high-quality data fueling AI is paramount to better understand and predict purchasing habits, and thereby inform marketing and advertising efforts.”
— Arun Ramaswamy, Chief Technology Officer, Global Consumer Business, Nielsen

“AI technologies are transforming organizations and freeing up employees to do higher-value work. For marketers and advertisers, AI is already disrupting core functions, including ad targeting, media buying, content creation, and propensity modeling.”
— Victoria Petrock, Principal Analyst, Emerging Technology, Insider Intelligence

“Data is the key to increasing engagement across platforms that deliver premium content. We’re thrilled to connect our Marketplace with IBM AI to deliver actionable insights, at scale, across the ecosystem in order to help partners thrive in an undefined future. As the digital marketing industry evolves, it’s more essential than ever to rely on trusted partners to preserve the integrity of the open web.”
— Grant Ries, SVP of Marketplaces & Emerging Business at LiveRamp

“AI is no longer an emerging technology, it’s here, now and the digital ecosystem must lean in to realize its full value beyond media buying and selling. I am thrilled to see IBM, with its deep roots in artificial intelligence, take on a leadership role to develop CTV and attribution solutions for the next generation marketplace.”
— David Cohen, CEO, IAB

“It’s in our DNA to empower our clients and partners with the tools to establish deep and trusted connections with consumers at scale. As inveterate champions of the power of math and science in marketing, we are eager to usher in a new era of enterprise applications into our industry and are excited to expand our partnership with IBM to introduce their world-class capabilities to an open web that keenly needs them.”
— Joe Zawadzki, founder and CEO, MediaMath

“We’re thrilled to help power IBM Watson Advertising with our Bidder-as-a-Service platform. It’s exciting to help IBM Watson unlock AI-driven, predictive dynamic creative for more relevant advertising that gets smarter over time.”
— Ari Paparo, Co-Founder & CEO, Beeswax

“As a company that has been integrating IBM Watson into our platform for over five years, our team at Influential has seen, firsthand, how crucial AI is in identifying the right influencers, targeting audiences, and delivering content at scale.”
— Ryan Detert, Chief Executive Officer, Influential